Educating for Hardware Specialization in the Chiplet Era: A Path for the HPC Community

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of educating HPC professionals in hardware specialization, especially with emerging chiplet technology, and shares mentoring strategies using open-source tools to bridge the skills gap.

Contribution

It introduces educational approaches and mentoring practices to develop hardware design skills in the HPC community for chiplet-based systems.

Findings

Mentoring graduate students enhances hardware design skills.

Open-source hardware tools facilitate rapid prototyping and research sharing.

Educational strategies address the hardware expertise gap in HPC.

Abstract

The advent of chiplet technology introduces cutting-edge opportunities for constructing highly heterogeneous platforms with specialized accelerators. However, the HPC community currently lacks expertise in hardware development, a gap that must be bridged to leverage these advancements. Additionally, technologies like chiplet is cutting-edge with limited educational resource available. This paper addresses potential hardware specialization direction in HPC and how to cultivate these skills among students and staff, emphasizing the importance of understanding and developing custom hardware (e.g., rapid prototyping and resource estimation). We have been mentoring graduate-level students and new staff in hardware designs in a hands-on manner, encouraging them to utilize modern open-source hardware tools for their designs, which facilitates the sharing of research ideas. Additionally, we provide a summary of theses tools as part of our approach to prototyping and mentoring.